The role of re-appropriation in open design : a case study on how openness in higher education for industrial design engineering can trigger global discussions on the theme of urban gardening

This case study explores the opportunities for students of Industrial Design Engineering to engage with direct and indirect stakeholders by making their design process and results into open-ended Designed Solutions. The reported case study involved 47 students during a two-weeks intensive course on the topic of urban gardening. Observations were collected during three distinctive phases: the co-design phase, the creation of an Open Design and the sharing of these design solutions on the online platform Instructables.com. The open sharing of local solutions triggered more global discussions, based on several types of feedbacks: from simple questions to reference to existing works and from suggestions to critiques. Also some examples of re-appropriation of the designed solutions were reported. These feedbacks show the possibilities for students to have a global vision on their local solutions, confronting them with a wider and more diverse audience. The case study shows on the other hand the difficulty in keeping students engaged in this global discussion, considering how after a few weeks the online discussions dropped to an almost complete silence. It is also impossible with such online platforms to follow the re-appropriation cycles, losing the possibility of exploring the new local context were the replication / modification of the designed product occurred. The course’s focus on Open Design is interesting both under the design and educational points of view. It implies a deep change in the teaching approach and learning attitude of students, allowing unknown peers to take part of the design process and fostering a global discussion starting from unique and local solutions

The Use of Object-Oriented Design Methodologies in Systems Design

Object-oriented design methodologies, along with object-oriented programming techniques, have recently gained significant popularity as their advantages have become evident. Traditional methodologies following the structured approach have not been successful in providing an accurate model of the business system.Object-oriented techniques, where an object in the computer system corresponds to a real-world object, have been much more successful in accurately modeling the business system and its environment. Object-oriented methodologies provide many advantages over structured approaches to systems design. Concepts such as data hiding, encapsulation, inheritance, dynamic binding, and polymorphism help to achieve an accurate and flexible system that is resistant to corruption and is easy to maintain. Objects, which are entities with a private memory and a public interface, are at the core of object-oriented methodologies. They represent the systems that are found in the real-world, and can be used, if they have been properly designed, as building blocks in various computer systems. The ability to re-use objects greatly reduces the cost of developing new systems. Not only do objects allow the reuse of program modules, but the reuse of entire system designs as well. In addition to reuse, they promote system extensibility and flexibility. Some drawbacks to the use of object-orientation exist, but can and should be overcome in order to obtain the advantages provided by the methodology. Students should familiarize themselves with object-oriented methodologies in order to place themselves in a better position in the job market upon graduation

Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes

Digital signal processing: the impact of convergence on education, society and design flow

Design and development of real-time, memory and processor hungry digital signal processing systems has for decades been accomplished on general-purpose microprocessors. Increasing needs for high-performance DSP systems made these microprocessors unattractive for such implementations. Various attempts to improve the performance of these systems resulted in the use of dedicated digital signal processing devices like DSP processors and the former heavyweight champion of electronics design – Application Specific Integrated Circuits. The advent of RAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays has changed the DSP design flow. Software algorithmic designers can now take their DSP algorithms right from inception to hardware implementation, thanks to the increasing availability of software/hardware design flow or hardware/software co-design. This has led to a demand in the industry for graduates with good skills in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This paper evaluates the impact of technology on DSP-based designs, hardware design languages, and how graduate/undergraduate courses have changed to suit this transition

Block-Based Development of Mobile Learning Experiences for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things enables experts of given domains to create smart user experiences for interacting with the environment. However, development of such experiences requires strong programming skills, which are challenging to develop for non-technical users. This paper presents several extensions to the block-based programming language used in App Inventor to make the creation of mobile apps for smart learning experiences less challenging. Such apps are used to process and graphically represent data streams from sensors by applying map-reduce operations. A workshop with students without previous experience with Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile app programming was conducted to evaluate the propositions. As a result, students were able to create small IoT apps that ingest, process and visually represent data in a simpler form as using App Inventor's standard features. Besides, an experimental study was carried out in a mobile app development course with academics of diverse disciplines. Results showed it was faster and easier for novice programmers to develop the proposed app using new stream processing blocks.Spanish National Research Agency (AEI) - ERDF fund

Quantum Portal

Este relatório enquadra-se no curso de Mestrado em Engenharia Informática - Computação Móvel da Escola de Tecnologia e Gestão do Instituto Politécnico de Leiria. O objetivo deste relatório é descrever todo o processo em relação ao estágio de 9 meses que foi realizado na empresa Domatica, bem como o trabalho que foi desenvolvido durante o estágio. Este relatório apresenta informações sobre o local do estágio, o trabalho desenvolvido durante o período de estágio e as conclusões extraídas após a conclusão do estágio. Todo o trabalho realizado foi dedicado ao portal Quantum node. Quantum Node Portal funciona como um Portal de Gestão de Informação e Dispositivos. Ele fornece aos clientes instalações como monitorar nós que estão localizados em diferentes locais. O nosso portal de projetos lida com informação sobre os Quantum Nodes dos vários clientes. A informação inclui o status (on-line / off-line), a localização, a visão dos detalhes dos nós, para reivindicar os nós pelo processo de autenticação e também o gerenciamento dos nós e contas de usuários, armazenando a informação atual do nó atualizada pelos clientes, focando principalmente na apresentação de dados visuais sob a forma de tabelas e gráficos e fornece segurança para o Portal Quantum